“But, Mr. Pryce,” began young Mr. Deighton, who was short and gingery, wore a pullover stained with chemicals, and spoke with a decidedly less well modulated accent, “I give you my word—”
“I am well aware,” Mr. Pryce flowed on, his long gray mustaches quivering with wounded feeling, “that to young scientific men like yourself, classics masters are mere useless survivals, a sort of dinosaur. I have no quarrel with that attitude. I understand well how it can be so. I do not complain. Also, I appreciate your desire for fresh air. Young people like open windows; they do not suffer from draughts as we old fogeys are apt to do. In opening the common-room window, you dislodged the pile of my half-term house reports, which, no doubt in complete conformity with some law of dynamics familiar to you, fell to the ground in hideous confusion. They had been carefully, alphabeticized in order of the boys’ names; this order was destroyed by the fall and some forty minutes were required to restore it. But what of that? Such an accident might happen to anyone,” said Mr. Pryce with noble acceptance. “I do not claim exemption from misfortune. But—”
“Another glass of sherry, Pryce?” put in Henry Brooke, proffering the decanter.
“Thank you, Headmaster. I am aware that you are trying to divert me from a painful subject,” said Mr. Pryce. “But your sherry is good and your thought a kind one, tee-hee!” He laughed gently and held out his glass, his innocent old eyes beaming. “So I accept with gratitude.”
“He’s rather a pet, after all,” thought Miss Phipps, who from her place beside Mrs. Brooke on the settee was watching the uncomfortable little scene.
“But, Mr. Pryce, I assure you I did not upset your pile of reports,” said young Deighton in a tone of greatly suppressed exasperation. “I never went near your desk. And I didn’t open the window.”
“It was open when I entered the common-room,” said Mr. Pryce with a mild, meditative air. “It is your lack of trust in my good fellowship which grieves me, Deighton. Have I proved myself so harsh a colleague that you cannot confess to me a small peccadillo, an accidental injury? That wounds me, my dear boy, wounds me deeply. I had not thought that my younger colleagues held me in such dread.”
“Mr. Pryce, I don’t hold you in any dread. I feel for you only respect and affection!” shouted young Deighton. “But I didn’t knock over your reports!”
“Well — let us dismiss the matter. Let us forget it,” said Mr. Pryce sadly. His sadness was genuine, Miss Phipps noted; the gleam in his old eyes faded, his mustaches drooped. “I raise my glass to you, Deighton. I drink to you and Science.”
“Mr. Pryce,” began Deighton in a high shrill voice, which reminded Miss Phipps of steam escaping from an overcharged boiler, “I—”
Henry Brooke laid a hand on his arm, and the young man turned away, crimson with rage.
“But wouldn’t it be better not to forget the incident? To probe it to the core?” said Miss Phipps boldly, rising and going toward the group.
On all their faces, as they turned to her, she read that male expression of distaste which means “Women!” Nevertheless, she persevered. She liked kind old Pryce, able Brooke, and struggling young Deighton; she wished them all well, and in her opinion the truth is the best gift one can wish for anyone.
“Such little mysteries, at first sight inexplicable, are my stock in trade as a detective story writer,” she went on blandly. “Could I have the details of this one, please?”
“My dear madam,” said old Mr. Pryce, bowing courteously, “I shall of course be most happy to serve you in any way. Without troubling you with the details of our routine, let me give you the essential facts. Yesterday morning during a free period just after break, I was working on a pile of reports in the common-room. I was alone in the room. The window was shut. I left the room, for a few moments only, to go out to ring a certain bell. As I went out, I encountered Mr. Deighton coming in. As I returned, I met Mr. Deighton coming along the passage from the common-room, which is, so to say, situated in a cul-de-sac. I entered the common-room and found my reports scattered over the floor, and the window slightly open.”
“Perhaps the draught from the window scattered the reports?” suggested Miss Phipps.
“A substantial paperweight rested on them,” said Mr. Pryce with his air of serious musing.
“And now you, Mr. Deighton,” said Miss Phipps in a friendly tone.
“Well — I don’t know anything about his reports, though I don’t suppose you’ll believe it,” snapped Deighton in his brash, aggressive manner. “I went into the common-room to fetch a dictionary from the shelves. It took me a minute or two to find it. I found it and left with it in my hand. I met Mr. Pryce in the corridor. That’s all.”
“Were the reports on the floor when you left the room?”
“No. Emphatically, no.”
“Was the window open?”
“I don’t know. I think not, but I couldn’t swear to it. At any rate, I never went near the window.”
“Perhaps you banged the door, and the vibration upset the reports?”
“I don’t bang doors, even if I didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge,” cried Deighton angrily. “And on my word of honor I never touched Mr. Pryce’s reports.”
“An interesting little problem,” said Miss Phipps in her blandest tone. Apart from the possibility that one of the two men was mistaken, she had not the faintest idea of any solution, but she did not intend to let the staff of Star Isle College know this. “It is these everyday minutiae which offer the greatest scope for keen ratiocination,” she continued.
The Headmaster gave her a shrewd look.
“And what would you suggest,” he began in a quizzical tone, when suddenly to Miss Phipps’s relief the sound of an immense bell clanged long and loud through the air. “Ah, lunch. On Saturdays we lunch in hall with the boys,” said the Headmaster. “Are you coming, Ella?”
His wife shook her head. “I’ll stay with the baby,” she said nervously.
The Headmaster was not pleased, but accepted her refusal with an urbane little bow, then ushered Miss Phipps out of the seaview windows. He took her at a smart pace along a path, under an archway, up some steps, across a huge kitchen — where Miss Bellivant amid rows of steel cookers and enameled refrigerators directed a scurrying crowd of white-coated girls — and through a pair of swing doors.
“Short cut,” he said briskly as they emerged on a dais by a long refectory table.
Miss Phipps nodded, too breathless to speak. The other masters streamed in their wake. Evidently punctuality was de rigueur at Star Isle College.
In the large dining hall, however, there was a long pause. Something, thought Miss Phipps, glancing down from the dais to the long rows of boys standing silent and attentive by the tables on which dishes already steamed, seemed to have gone wrong. The other masters did not look in the direction of Dr. Brooke, who stood silent and motionless, his face carefully blank. Then suddenly in the gallery at the far end of the hall appeared an older lad with a silver badge in his buttonhole. He was crimson and breathless, but managed to utter a Latin grace without stumbling. At its conclusion the school sat down and fell to, and several silver-badged lads sitting on the opposite side of the high table from Miss Phipps passed her meat, vegetables, and gravy with great politeness. Dr. Brooke’s brow remained frowning, however, and he did not speak.